Documentation Team

Template:DocumentationTeam/Header We will need to create documentation for our own work, and we should contribute to OLPC documentation.

We need to decide on document formats and tools. At some point we will create new formats, based on our research into new textbook capabilities given Sugar software.

Participants in documentation (SMEs, writers, editors, designers...) should list themselves on the DocumentationTeam/Contacts page.

See also OLPC Publications in the OLPC Wiki.

API documentation

• sugar-base and sugar-toolkit has API documentation in the code. What tool do we use to generate html? Where do we generate it and where we make it available? Do we need to build them to generate docs?

• See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/API_reference#System_Services.2FHardware for PyDoc and epydoc references. Also, how do we want to reference http://wiki.laptop.org/go/API_reference? Is it out of date? Do we start from scratch, or just update that? --Morgs 14:57, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

• Probably we should document the datastore dbus API. I'm not sure what's the best way to generate documentation for it. It's so small that a wiki page might be the simpler solution for now.
• Collaboration API. I have no idea, morgs we need your help here.

• Existing collaboration documentation is at [1] --Morgs 19:59, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

• Morgs, my impression after a 3 minutes look over the available documentation is that there is little written with activity authors in mind, and that it's dispersed in several pages and mixed with implementation docs. Is that impression correct? I would like to have a couple of things: 1 complete documentation of the API which interest activity authors (with good links to dbus documentation since it's used so heavily) 2 A complete tutorial as part of the "manual". One of the Tubes pages looks like a pretty good start in this respect. Does it make sense to you? Can we make it happen? -- Marcopg

• Yes we can! --Morgs 13:50, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
• Hey, I came up with an alternate "reference" implementation for collaboration when I wrote Colors!, I think it's a lot easier to understand and could be the basis for a good tutorial. The only weird thing is, I wanted my activity class to receive DBus signals directly, so I subclassed ExportedGObject but initialized late - hacky, I know. It would be nice if this were not needed! [2] Wade 18:49, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

• Low level API (non-python activities). We should just move bert document on this wiki.

this is the page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Low-level_Activity_API but it must be complemented with

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Factory
• http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/#sugxterm

Manual

• Setup a development environment. This is wiki oriented so we should probably not even mention jhbuild (we should definitely not do so until we have a bunch of autobuild slaves running).
• "Write your activity" tutorial. It should include all the important bits: graphic controls, datastore, collaboration
  • see OLPC Austria's Activity Handbook ChristophD 03:59, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
• Probably good to have a pygame tutorial, it's probably the best thing we have at the moment to do free form graphics stuff.
• Etoys based activity tutorial?

Community

• ReleaseTeam/Roadmap
• Release process
• Bug triage
• Publish your activity. Maybe we need bits of infrastructure to make this easier, something like firefox addons - proposal at Activity portal. But even just a wiki page could be start if we maintain it well.